PRODUCTION CREDITS
Sound installation (site specific – outdoors): Pedro Alcalde
Inauguration of the project: (UN)inhabited Paradise
Sound Games Park: Daniel Tornero, Ana Cristina Herreros, Malú Cayetano and Campo Adentro INLAND (Amelie Aranguren)
Commissioned by: ImaginaMadrid, Matadero Intermediae, Madrid City Council
Venue: Site in front of the Municipal Public Library Ana María Matute, Madrid
Date: 17th November 2018 (November and December 2018)
BACKGROUND
In a celebrated lecture held in 1951, Heidegger observed that the essential feature of the human being was “to inhabit”, and that “to inhabit” means at the same time to care for and cultivate.
(UN)inhabited Paradise is a project designed to care for and cultivate a specific place in the Carabanchel neighborhood of Madrid through listening and observation. The project started gathering the resident’s oral memory and offering several sound workshops dedicated to the listening of the site´s urban ecology: soil, water, flora and fauna. A subsequent landscaping project at the same site placed periscopes, listeners, topophones and loudspeakers offering new ways of observing and listening to the place and the voices of its inhabitants. The sound installation was commissioned for the inauguration of the project.
TITLE
Uninhabited Paradise is the title of a novel by Ana María Matute, the writer who gives the name to the Municipal Public Library located in front of the site where the intervention took place. The privative prefix “un” is placed in parentheses following the intention of the project to turn to inhabitable what was previously a wasteland.
MUSIC
The sound installation consists of a four-channel electroacoustic composition with their respective speakers oriented towards the four cardinal points: North, South, East and West.
Lengthy notes produced by a vibraphone played with contrabass bow followed by the sound of a sonar (a sound whose original function is to wait for an echo) regularly punctuate the duration of the composition. From there emerge, echoingly, the sounds of four trombones, distributed along the four channels of the installation. Its echoes and ramifications progressively sculpt the space, inhabiting, in this way, the site and its surroundings.
The musical material is accompanied as a counterpoint with the sounds of the 34 bird species that live around the site and the neighbor’s voices, children and adults, with their stories, memories, emotions and desires.
The sound installation does not have an apparent beginning or end, as if the sounds, voices and music were always there and our momentary listening would capture only an instant of the sound flow that inhabits the place.
SOUND PALETTE
distributed in four channels
1- Vibraphone notes played with a double bass bow (Bb4, E5, C#6, F4, B4, G3, D4, A#5)
2- Sonar sound
3- Four tenor trombones (echoes)
4- Neighbors’ voices (children)
6- Neighbors’ voices (adults)
7- 34 bird species present at the site
MEDIUM
Four-channel audio file
DURATION
1 hour
